"We All Need Resurrecting": Transformations and Restorations in the Work of George Ella Lyon

George Ella Lyon's writing has received some good critical attention over the last twenty years. In quantity it may be less than that paid some of her contemporaries, but better to draw a moderate amount of careful and sensible consideration than to draw a flood of vague and/or pretentious responses posing as literary criticism. For this welcome feature in Appalachian Heritage, I aim to call attention to some of the best published discussion of her writing; I also hope to add some observations others may find useful as they think about the work of this important Appalachian artist. I want to focus particularly on an aspect of her oeuvre that has yet to draw much commentary: a recurring focus on resurrection or rebirth.

As she indicates on her web site (http://www.georgeellalyon.com), Lyon considers herself "first of all a poet": she is the author of the chapbook Mountain (1983); the full-length collection Catalpa (1994, reprinted with a new introduction in 2007); many as-yet uncollected poems published in magazines and journals; some remarkable prose essays on poetry; and a book that's part poetry collection, part writing manual: Where I'm From, Where Poems Come From (1999). An important early survey of Lyon's techniques and concerns is Jim Wayne Miller's "A Heart Leafed with Words Like a Tree: The Poetry of George Ella Lyon," in the 1994 Lyon special issue of Iron Mountain Review. Also essential is Roberta T. Herrin's later discussion of the poetry and its relationship to Lyon's writing for children: "From Poetry to Picture Books: The Words of George Ella Lyon," in Felicia Mitchell's 2002 anthology Her Words: Diverse Voices in Contemporary Appalachian Women's Poetry.

One poem both Miller and Herrin briefly address is a poem about poetics, "How the Letters Bloom Like a Catalpa Tree"; Lyon first collected it in Mountain and then reprinted it in Catalpa. It's a poem that invites much further discussion. One of its most interesting aspects is the way it bleakly acknowledges but then transcends the prospect of its own failure. Like Marianne Moore in "The Fish" and William Carlos Williams in "The Yachts," Lyon asks us to read the title as the beginning of the first sentence: "How the Letters Bloom Like a Catalpa Tree," she begins, "in this poem, on a day when tulip bells / ring up from the ground, when the crab apple / swarms with blossoms" (27). Lyon goes on to express her wish to write in language that will always seem as fresh as spring. As Walt Whitman so often does, here she addresses her unknown reader directly:

                                                      How I would likethe words to shine always like sword grassand be stubborn as thistle and come to youheady as lilac, as dandelion to the new bee.

(27)

This is her ideal, but of course it's a very tall order; furthermore, so many other poets have aimed at this that the ideal itself seems, ironically, hackneyed. "But you have read this / so many times," she writes, "the message / patched and worn like sleeves." She notes, "You've seen words die / down, thought ravel," and "you've / seen… the words [fail like] old wood / storms break against the house." Keeping in mind the difficulty (or impossibility) of writing as she would like, she asks, "What could I send you?" (27).

Having implied the likelihood of failure, she then makes a new start, not directly answering her own question, but instead proceeding to tell us about a basketmaker named Oaksie Caudill. He cuts down and strips a white oak for his work; as Herrin notes, the wood strips are "a tactile material unwieldy as words" (168). Like Walden's mythic Artist of Kouroo, who while carving a staff "made no compromise with Time" (582), Caudill has the patience to do the job right: "He's got time as much as time's / got him" (27). The poem ends by drawing an analogy between Caudill's work and the ideal poet's:

Oaksie's trade...